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Comment by input_sh | Hacker News Reader

Life + 70 has always been an oversimplification, we still haven't even reached 70 years since the introduction of these rules (1973 in the US, in other countries depends on when the US strogarmed them into adopting similar rules).

There's all sorts of quirks for anything published before that rule got standardised more-or-less worldwide, but in general 1930-1945 is still like a legal grey area that can be challenged in court and you should be good to go for anything published before that. And don't get me even started on posthumous publications, that's a whole different can of worms where a family member might claim some contribution (like for example Anne Frank's father), pushing the copyright further to the life of the author + life of that family member + 70.

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Do you really think that the whole world is waiting for whatever the US say to make their laws? Spain copyright law is dated 1879: https://www.boe.es/buscar/doc.php?id=BOE-A-1879-40001 , based on the French _droit d'auteur_ laws of 1700's. About the matter being discused here, read Artículo 6: dead date + 80.

No I do not think it's an original concept of the US, more that it was the US that conditioned many other countries to adopt similar laws as a condition for trade deals / investments.

As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much ever since the printing press.

It is not difficult to find that the "US conditioning other countries in the 1970's" actually started in 1886 at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention when 10 european countries agreed on legal principles to protect original works. Among these 10, France, Germany, Italy, France and UK, so in practice the whole Western Europe. US didn't join until 1989.

The original treaty, if I am not misunderstanding here: https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_berne includes a "dead + 50 recomended" protection since the 1908 revision, before that it was up to each country laws, and in 1948 it changed to "dead + 50 minimum mandatory". In 1993 it was raised to "dead + 70" in the UE, to be followed by the US with the same extension in 1988 in Sonny Bono Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act.

I want you to look at that summary you've posted again, specifically the TRIPS part of it. Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights only came into force in 1995. Is that not the evidence that the rest of the world was strongarmed into adopting similar laws? The EU, Japan and a few others definitely supported the US in this initiative, but it was the US that heavily lobbied for it. Before TRIPS came to be, copyright effectively didn't exist in most of the world (yes, Western Europe excluded).

You're not contradicting anything I'm saying, you're just saying the same thing with more words because you don't understand where my argument comes from. What I don't understand is why you would even want to take credit for such a broken system to begin with.

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